A Weekly Planning Ritual That Works

For a long time, I’ve been searching for a planning methodology that fits my life. I delved into bullet point journals, to-do lists, daily notes, and the Obsidian rabbit hole. None of them worked. I followed some for months, but never felt like they fit into how my brain and life work. Until I created my own system, combining the best of all things I tried. Now, every Sunday around 21:30, I go to my desk, take my physical agenda, recap the last week and plan the next one. I can’t say this system will work for everyone, but I’m sure it will give ideas to a few.

The system I created takes all the pieces from different planning systems. It contains to-dos, calendar, mindfulness, checklists, reflection, promises, and tracking. It’s a combination of ideas that fit one week into two pages of a pocket-sized notebook.

It’s essential for me that this is not a digital system. The pen and paper, and limitations of the size of the agenda give constraints. When limitations are removed, creativity and focus go with them. Most digital tools offer flexibility by eliminating these constraints, providing a sense of pseudo-creativity when it comes to planning. Additionally, the pocket-sized agenda allows me to carry it everywhere, preventing me from reaching for my phone for every single thing.

Agenda Layout

I use a Leuchtturm A6 weekly planner with an extra pen loop to ensure I always have a pen with it. Although the Leuchtturm weekly planner’s page layout looks a little different, I customize each week in the following setup.

Seeing the whole week at once and the quality of the paper and agenda are the reasons I chose Leuchtturm. At a glance, my layout gives everything I need to plan for the whole week:

• Days section to write down important events, exercise plan, and crucial TODOs
• Weekly Focus for mindfulness
• Reading/Listening to/Learning section to track progress
• Pre-week Checklist to ensure I don’t miss anything during the ritual
• Weekly Promises to push myself out of my comfort zone
• Reflections to retrospectively look at the last week

Once I place the layout, I focus on checking all items on the Pre-week Checklist one by one. The items inside are not for the week, but for the planning ritual itself. Although the checklist fulfills its job within the next 15-30 minutes, it ensures I don’t miss anything during the ritual. Once all items are checked, the ritual comes to an end.

After the layout is set, I begin by recapping the last week.

Recapping the Previous Week

Without looking back, I would be fooling myself to plan the next week well. Retrospection brings learning: learning from mistakes, learning from unexpected events, and learning about what has happened both within and outside my control, as well as what I did well. That includes assessing how much I was able to stick to my habits and my budget.

Habit Tracking

One of the things I learned from Jerry Seinfeld’s chain method and James Clear’s Atomic Habits was to track the things I want to do and get better.

Therefore, I try to track habits as much as possible. However, sometimes, I forget to mark some habits as completed in my habit tracker. During this ritual, I complete the previous week’s missing tracking. Because if I don’t, I’ll never remember them in the future. So, this step ensures that I track my habits at least once a week—for my memory, it is a good time span to remember.

Financial Tracking

I did budgeting for a while and tried to plan all my spending with apps like YNAB, but it didn’t fit my lifestyle. I was stressed while trying to maintain a budget. As I don’t spend money unnecessarily, don’t have any debt, and am privileged enough not to need a tight budget, I’ve abandoned budgeting.

Instead, during this ritual, I look at what I spent money on in the last week and learn from it. If I had an impulse buy, I would acknowledge it and try to prevent myself from making it in the future. If I had an unexpected big payment, I would try to learn and increase my savings goal to put extra money aside for the next unexpected event.

I also check on my investments and review their performance. I don’t follow the financial market daily as it is volatile. I instead look for substantial changes in my investments and observe if I need to set time aside during the week to reassess any situation.

Reflections

Once I complete the tracking, I use the empty section on the bottom right to write my reflections on the last week.

Reflections mostly focus on understanding if the plan for the week was challenging, whether my promises were impossible to achieve, and whether the events were overwhelming. Evaluating the previous week allows me to set the upcoming week more realistically, which is what I do next.

Plan the New Week

After a retrospective look at the last week, I can usually position myself better. I begin with routine tasks and planned events, and then gradually move on to my ambitious wishes.

Event Prep & Scheduling

When I sit down to plan the week ahead, I often have a few events already scheduled. Although all are always on my Google Calendar, I still write them down on the left side under the day. These events include meeting with a friend, joining a meetup, or going to a concert.

The purpose is to know how much time and headspace I will have left for the day and the rest of the week. If I already plan to attend a meetup on Tuesday, I know I won’t have time in the evening for something else. If I know I will have to sleep late on Saturday, I don’t plan a workout for the early morning on Sunday.

Once events are on the calendar side of the agenda, I know what I can plan for workouts.

Workout Schedule

I used to be indecisive in the mornings. While trying to decide, I lost time and, along with it, my motivation. I do not want to find myself in a limbo of “Which workout should I do today?” when I wake up. That’s the reason I plan what workout I will do each day and choose my rest day(s). The main goal is to decide for my future self.

It is easier for me to follow the plan if I have already decided and distributed the workouts to the days. I sometimes change the plan during the week, but only when I have a specific reason. I might shift a rest day when I feel sick or have muscle pain, or shuffle it with another workout, but I still stick to the workouts as much as I can.

Once the events and workouts are planned, the time comes for what I want to do beyond my routine life.

Weekly Focus

I choose one trait to focus on during the week. This is neither a goal nor something to complete in a day or two; it’s a continuous mindfulness exercise, something to keep in mind throughout the week.

A weekly focus becomes even more powerful when it lasts for a few weeks.

For example, a few months ago, my focus was “write without self-judgment or self-criticism” for a few weeks. During that time, whenever I had a pen at hand, I wrote whatever came to my mind. When I caught myself thinking, “This text doesn’t make sense,” or “I produce terrible ideas,” or “delete everything and find another angle,” I diverted my attention away. The focus was to keep writing without self-destruction.

The important thing is to have mindful moments and focus on what truly matters while making progress on weekly promises.

Weekly Promises

If I have to choose the most important part of weekly planning, I would choose my weekly promises because these promises bring ambition to my life.

Until setting promises, everything is still a routine life for me. Nothing ambitious; only the routine is more organized. With three weekly promises I make to myself, I raise the bar.

You can think of these as goals, but using the word promise gives a different meaning. If I promise myself to do something by the end of the week, I try my best to achieve it. It also forces my hand not to do other things. That’s the whole point.

In a given week, I may want to do a hundred things, but I deliberately focus on my promises and avoid the rest. One example from my previous promises is “Finish Mediations newsletter’s 13th issue.” I always send the newsletter on Tuesday, and the promise was to make it ready on Sunday, two days before. During the week, that’s what I focused on and worked on to bring to the finish line. That required me not to do many other things, such as binge-watching a TV series or watching random YouTube videos. When I had to choose one, I knew what I had promised myself. By deciding on one promise, I eliminated many other decisions.

Ending the Ritual

Once the weekly promises are set, I briefly scan the whole plan again. I ensure that everything on my checklist has a ✔︎ on it. If yes, I’m ready for the week. I close the notebook and go to sleep.

During the week, I regularly check my notebook to remind myself of my promises. Whenever I find myself sitting idly or binge-watching random YouTube videos, I look at my agenda and pull myself to keep my promises.

Sunday evenings are my ritualistic moment—my last 15-30 minutes before I go to bed. The ritual mentally closes my week and prepares me for the next; then I sleep in peace.

And with this post being published, I kept another promise to myself. ✔︎